“Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.”

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.

Hope, deceiving as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.

What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.

It is almost always a fault of one who loves not to realize when he ceases to be loved.

Everyone complains of his memory, and nobody complains of his judgment.

It is easier to know men in general, than men in particular.

We seldom find people ungrateful so long as it is thought we can serve them.

No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.

Quarrels would not last long if the fault was only on one side.

The principal point of cleverness is to know how to value things just as they deserve.

We should often feel ashamed of our best actions if the world could see all the motives which produced them.

Some people displease with merit, and others’ very faults and defects are pleasing.

No man deserves to be praised for his goodness, who has it not in his power to be wicked. Goodness without that power is generally nothing more than sloth, or an impotence of will.

The reason why so few people are agreeable in conversation is that each is thinking more about what he intends to say than others are saying.

We would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all.

The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.

Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.

Since death is certain and the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?

The central question of a warrior’s training is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to discomfort.

Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic-this is the spiritual path.

I am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.

Words are such uncertain things, they so often sound well but mean the opposite of what one thinks they do.

Events of human origin are uncertain, but all is regulated and governed by the incalculable power of God, inspiring us not through drunken fury nor by frantic movement, but through the influences of the stars.

There is a certain ecstasy in wanting things you can’t get.